This journal is a relief. When I am tired ... out comes this, and down goes every thing. But I can't read it over--and God knows w...hat contradictions it may contain. If I am sincere with myself (but I fear one lies more to one's self than to any one else) every page should confute, refute, and utterly abjure its predecessor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A true voluptuary will never abandon his mind to the grossness of reality. It is by exalting the earthly, the material, the physiq...ue of our pleasures, by veiling these ideas, by forgetting them altogether, or, at least, never naming them hardly to one's self, that we alone can prevent them from disgusting.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, bef...ore they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It is easier to do one's duty to others than to one's self. If you do your duty to others, you are considered reliable. If you do ...your duty to yourself, you are considered selfish.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animalthan the Public. It is th...e greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to characte...r as the recognition of one's self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded--a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance, wealth, family and position.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

As for the peasant populations of a great part of the world, they aren't so much anxious as hungry. They aren't anxious about whet...her they will get a salary raise, or which of the three colleges of their choice they will be admitted to, or whether to buy a Ford or Cadillac, or whether the kind of TV set they want is too expensive. They are hungry, cold and, in many parts of the world, they dread that local warfare, bandits, political coups may endanger their homes, their meager livelihoods and their lives. But surely they are not anxious. For anxiety, as we have come to use it to describe our characteristic state of mind, can be contrasted with the active fear of hunger, loss, violence and death. Anxiety is the appropriate emotion when the immediate personal terror--of a volcano, an arrow, the sorcerer's spell, a stab in the back and other calamities, all directed against one's self--disappears.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

... woman's cause is the cause of the weak; and when all the weak shall have received their due consideration, then woman will hav...e her "rights," and the Indian will have his rights, and the Negro will have his rights, and all the strong will have learned at last to deal justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly; and our fair land will have been taught the secret of universal courtesy which is after all nothing but the art, the science, and the religion of regarding one's neighbor as one's self, and to do for him as we would, were conditions swapped, that he do for us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some o...f it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »